Is your blog a boy blog or a girl blog?

My excellent good friend Nathan recently sent me this link:

Gender Analyzer

It's some kind of something that can allegedly determine your gender based on your blog. It's currently accurate 58% of the time (based on the self-reporting of the users). Is that impressive? Not very, but better than if it were total bunk.

How does it work anyway? The site only says it uses a "text classifier" that was "trained" on 4000 blogs. That implies that the makers of this thing don't really know what the substantive differences between the genders may be (uh, in terms of blog writing, obvs).

Still the whole idea of determining gender from writing raises questions like, Do women write a certain way and men another? Do men/women use certain nouns and verbs more often? Ask more questions? Use the word "feel" more often? Is it sentence length? Punctuation? Is it counting gendered pronouns? What if I put in the blog of a transgendered person?

Anywhoozle, one other interesting thing is the Gender Analyzer doesn't just say M or F, it gives a percentage of how M or F. I've put in most of the blogs I read, including mine, and most of them have come out as "quite gender neutral." One though, librarian.net, came out 98% female. Whoa. AND HERE IS THE CRAZY THING: librarian.net is written by a lady named Jessamyn who also has a personal blog and when I put that in, it came out 88% male. Oh, SNAP. Busted!

HardlyWorking.com

Today I've been thinking about starting a website for people who don't have a lot to do at their jobs.

I've noticed a lot of Facebook status updates in the vein of, "I got so much done at work today! And so little of it was actual work I'm paid to do," so I'm confident there is an audience for this kind of thing. In fact, just recently I was at a bridal shower where the maid of honor informed us that most of the wedding planning had been done while the bride was at work being paid to do something else. And anyone who watches The Office is familiar with just how unproductive a work day can be.

So I'm thinking the purpose of this website would be to give examples of things people have done while ostensibly "working" for their paycheck. We could also have forums for people to discuss any guilt they feel due to how little they actually get done/happiness at having landed a job that requires fewer than 10 actual hours of work per week.

There's probably a website like this already, right? But what domain could be better than hardlyworking.com? I checked and it's available.

Situations in which Seattleites will make conversation with total strangers

1. A dog is involved.

2. A small child is involved.

3. The weather is unbelievable awful.

My Review of the Opera

Yesterday was my first day off in two weeks. I went to the opera. It was not as relaxing or exhilarating as I'd hoped it'd be; it was pretty creepy. Both operas (it was a double feature with an intermission in between) were about tragic love that ends in death--but not in a romantic way, in a chilling, cringe-y kind of way.

Opera 1: Bluebeard

When I was little, we told the Bluebeard story around the campfire to scare each other. Bluebeard was a pirate who took his new wife on his ship and told her not to go in this locked room. But, duh, she goes in the room and finds all these dead women (his previous wives!). She gets blood on her dress (or maybe on the key she used to unlock the room?) and can't get it off, so Bluebeard finds out she saw the dead ladies and...SHE JOINS THEM.

The opera was pretty much the same story, only Bluebeard's not a pirate and it was all sung in Hungarian. The moral of the story: You don't need to know too much about your man.

Opera 2: Erwatung

Erwatung apparently means "expectation" in German. Whatever. I hardly read the surtitles because they were almost total nonsense. The gist of this opera is that a crazy lady (she's in a straight jacket) goes crazy about a guy having sex with another woman. Then I think she killed him. Or maybe she was just fantasizing about killing him. I don't know. But the guy was naked and rolling around on stage for a few minutes, so it held my attention.

The moral of the story: Bitch is crazy!

So what did I learn from the opera yesterday? Hm. Stay away from insane people. Or people who have blue beards and many previous wives that have disappeared.